Let’s take the 2012 FAA budget of $15.9 billion.
Now let’s reduce that by sequestration ($637 million) and you get $15.3 billion.
Adjust it for inflation, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI inflation calculator, and you have $14.3 billion in 2008 dollars.
Which is still higher in real terms than the FAA’s 2008 budget.
Air traffic control handled planes in 2008 with less money than the FAA has now, post-sequestration.
What’s more, there were one million more flights in 2008 than there were in 2012.
They used to do a whole lot more than they have to do today, with less money.
A 4% cut to budget, even normalized across an entire year, does not have to wreak havoc on the traveling public unless the FAA chooses to make those cuts in the most painful way they possibly can in order to score a political point.
It’s an open question how much damage they will do to the U.S. economy, and an open question who will get the blame for it from the electorate. But there is no reason for this to happen other than cynical politics, and those involved should truly be ashamed of themselves.
I’m not taking sides in budget debates with this post. All things equal I think that sequestration is a silly way to make cuts, but it’s the result of a dysfunctional political system so it’s unsurprising that we get there. I do think that folks actually running government agencies have an obligation to run them in as mission effective a way as possible under the budget circumstances given, rather than making political decisions which inflict far more damage than necessary in hopes of winning political arguments with the voters.
I tend to agree. especially with your math less planes, more money. What’s up with that???
I work for a small agency in a big department. I am doing two full time jobs because of the budget situation. Neither group of my customers are well served.
Some say the only time government was properly cut was during the French Revolution. 🙂
If we read WSJ, they explain very clearly and eloquently who is to blame 🙂
“I’m not taking sides in budget debates with this post.”
Please. You’re entitled to your opinion, and your opinion is entitled to due respect because of your exceptional knowledge of the industry. But you most certainly are taking a side, and the side you’re taking is the predictable one based on your political beliefs.
I don’t claim to know whether the FAA could make the cuts in a considerably less painful way. After reading this four line analysis, I still don’t know the answer.
It’s Bob Crandall’s fault:)
What is exactly the relevance of emplanements for this discussion?! ATCOs control airplanes not people.
Come on Larry. This post is solely based on numbers and facts. Which is too bad. Gary won’t say it but I will: Obama is lying to the American people. This whole thing is BS to pressure conservatives to repeal the sequester so liberals can continue to grow the size and budget of the federal government!
I agree with LarryInNYC, your politics inform your views Gary, and given how often they jibe with the WSJ editorial page, it’s hard to believe that you’re being objective. Not that you have to be, it’s your blog.
What is certain is that fiscal 2013 is in the books, and the cuts we have aren’t going away. What is in play is what happens in fiscal 2014 which starts in October. Adding another, similar size cut on top of this one is only going to compound the problem.
Unfortunately, the sequester was designed to make it impossible for the executive branch to do what you accuse it of doing. By the terms of the law, and this is very clear from the legislative history, federal agencies have no discretion as to where the cuts fall.
@Miguel – I wrote enplanements and actually meant to say “flights” which is what the million figure referred to. Most of the drop is in general aviation.
@Chris – no, the sequester does NOT make it impossible to pick and choose cuts. Here’s the liberal blogger Dylan Matthews at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog on the subject:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/22/heres-how-you-run-a-sequester-scrape-five-percent-less-poop/
“What room there is comes from defining exactly what is meant by “programs,” “projects” and “activities.” “There is not a standard definition,” Stan Collender, a longtime Congressional budget hand currently at the PR firm Qorvis, explains. “It’s not something that exists anywhere else in nature.”
The terms originate in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985, which established the first sequestration procedure, intended to implement automatic budget cuts if the deficit exceeded fixed targets. But neither that bill, nor the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 (which succeeded Gramm-Rudman-Hollings), nor the Budget Control Act of 2011 (which created the impending 2013 sequester) specified just which components of each department and agency were “programs,” which were “projects” and which were “activities.””
The discussion goes on to explain that what constitutes programs, projects, and accounts are entirely up to OMB.
The military could be a program. Or a single missile system may be a program. And the Executive Branch’s Office of Management and Budget has to decide.
@Askia I haven’t read the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page in quite some time (largely since I don’t get the paper, so I read only business articles or Scott McCartney and Susan Carey pieces on travel, usually those that are sent to me)
As for October (fiscal 2014) the sequestration cuts are built into the baseline, right? Though by definition there’ll be a full year rather than half a year in which to realize the ‘savings’ (relative to prior baseline).
More of your usual, tiresome, right-wing talking points.
Those who hate the idea of government just can’t seem to get it past their idealogical filters that when you cut government by X percent, X percent less stuff gets done. Now that it’s actually inconveniencing the entitled (as opposed to the poor), heads gotta roll. Oh the outrage!
Enjoy your tea-party utopia.
@JD @Larry – I don’t think that on the whole the administration is any more dishonest about budget numbers than the House majority. I don’t think that sequestration is an especially good way to cut either. But the House Republicans’ dishonesty in their budgets, Mitt Romney’s claims about saving Medicare or criticizing Obama for cutting it, these sorts of things aren’t really at issue in travel, so I don’t write about them. What’s happening now is an air traffic control furlough, and it’s entirely unnecessary. I don’t think that the FAA is too stupid to know it, so I have to think they’re making a calculating decision here.
@Zengo – very few people who know my politics would ever call me a right winger, but thanks for commenting!
As for my focus on sequestration as it relates to travel, well, travel is what I write about here. And frankly I don’t consider myself enough of an expert to pontificate on the particulars of specific social programs here, and so I generally do not.
Love this blog but I think you are off the mark here. Your math is indeed simple and a compelling question for the FAA to answer, but it is still a huge leap to say that this is a deliberate move/calculation by someone to inflict pain and gain publicity. The FAA is subject to so many constraints (thanks to DOT regs, legislation, sequestration legislation itself, etc) that any analysis of their choice of cuts that does not discuss said constraints is pretty vacuous in my opinion. In any case, keep up the healthy skepticism, but also be careful about jumping to speculative, obvious, and cynical conclusions.
1. The 4% cut was for the fiscal year budget, but the sequester went into effect in March, so the actual cut is 8-9% for the rest of the year, which is about consistent with a 10% furlough mandate to employees.
2. Many procurement projects can’t be stopped on a dime. Cutting funding for many projects midstream actually costs (much) more money in the long run. Labor costs are the easiest and most flexible expense. It’s simple to furlough employees, it’s very hard to analyze what parts of e.g. NextGen can be cut without significantly raising expenses to the FAA at a later date.
3. The FAA’s budget is dominated by salaries. Generally salaries for federal employees increase at fixed rates rather than being tied specifically to inflation. You might have noticed something that happened in 2008 to the economy that affected the inflation rate severely, but did not alter government employee contracts…
4. As any federal manager will tell you, it is much easier to do things in an “across the board” fashion than to try to use judgment to furlough some employees but not others. One can imagine the employee grievances from picking and choosing “furlough winners”.
I’m not saying that, in an ideal world, the FAA couldn’t find savings in a way to minimize impact to travelers.
The answer as to why they didn’t is rooted in very ordinary government employee politics, not some kind of right winger fantasy about the government out to “make people pay” for the cuts. Moreover, there isn’t much else to cut at the FAA besides salaries and your estimated size of the cuts is also wrong.
The reason liberal posters here feel you are parroting the WSJ editorial page is the adoption of the conspiracy explanation rather than taking the Occam’s Razor explanation of typical bureaucratic politics and an understanding of the share of FAA’s budget that is labor.
Great that people realize budget cuts have consequences. The whole idea of the sequester was that budgets would be slashed across the board, not micro-manage pick and choose how VISIBLE those cuts are. After all, if I were a manager and say cut spending on facilities ONLY and not people, then you’d have no incentive but to keep cutting my budget. No immediate pain for you right? Eventually it’s cut so far all the radars are way out of date and die.
I’m also REAL sorry about this but airlines have to take some heat too. They knew this was coming, why didn’t they change their schedules?
Suck it up buttercup!
I should add that Congress has meddled in FAA already to make them spend money. How many inspectors did they have in 2008 versus now? Congress made them hire me. Their NexGen ATC? Congress pushing them to implement that, and it’s costly. Beyond that some 70% of their budget is personnel, how do you avoid cutting there? You can’t.
JD +1
“They used to do a whole lot more than they have to do today, with less money.” That sums it all up perfectly.
And I’m not buying the absurd “the sequester requires” stuff at all. If Obama didn’t want this to happen, he’d just issue an executive order to cut actual waste at the FAA instead of air traffic control, based on it being a National Emergency. And no, his Justice Department would not challenge that in court. In fact no one at all would challenge it in court. This is happening only to try to force a public outcry to rescind the miniscule budget cuts in a bloated government that doesn’t even have a budget.
For everyone who is saying “the sequester requires”, my response is that Federal law requires a Federal budget every single year, and we haven’t had one since Obama has been President.
I have to laugh that the liberals can’t come up with an excuse for the nature of the FAA cuts so instead they start blaming Gary.
‘For everyone who is saying “the sequester requires”, my response is that Federal law requires a Federal budget every single year, and we haven’t had one since Obama has been President’
Hit the nail on the head
Naive. Not Gary, but some of the comments above. Please. As the President’s former chief of staff put it so bluntly: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Obama, Bush, Clinton, you name them, they would all do the exact same thing. Gary is pointing out in the simplest way possible that the air traffic situation must be politics. But do we need numbers to know that? Come on, get real. Obama will milk this for all it is worth. Just as Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy… would have. Ideology has nothing to do with it. (And for the record, I’m a bleeding heart liberal.)
In addition to what the above poster mentioned, I believe there was a new union contract ratified in 2009 that significantly increased personnel expenses. There were also additional costly (and in my view very necessary) work rules implemented in recent years after a bunch of incidents with ATC controller.
I have a very close friend who is a supervisor in FAA management. He was a controller for 20 years and now manages controllers. He told me that the reported 15,000 controllers who are on “furlough” are actually taking one day per 15-day pay period as furlough. But guess what they are doing on their day without pay? They are working as contract labor to the FAA at their own desks at 1.5 X their normal pay! Why? Because the contract pay was not covered by sequester. Only our government could do this!
@TOM, horsehockey!
The Reagan-era 1985 Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, SPECIFICALLY says that budget cuts must come from each program item and you may NOT switch money between budgets to patch things up. Agency hands are tied, you CANNOT patch up Operations by swiping money from the other 2 budget categories.
CONGRESS *chose* to have this particular result, whether the jerks in front of the cameras realize it or not. THEY *chose* to pull the trigger on these budget cuts, they ought to know how their laws implement that, no they act all confused instead! It’s easy to talk big about how we need to “bite the bullet” and start cutting isn’t it? You got it!
While I am sure that some or even much of this is political posturing, I also find that maybe it is a bit over simplified. For example, I had thought that the FAA was having to increase training costs as a large number of current controllers were reaching retirement age. Also, why 2008 as your comparison? And for air traffic, are you using all flights (public and private) or only commerical flights? So while I am sure that some or even much of the current situation is unwarranted, I am not convinced that all of it was unavoidable. How much, who knows… likely we never will know…
@Andrew the simplest thing, and what aviation experts had been recommending for the past six months, was,the deferral of NextGen capital investments.
@David – 2008 as a base year wasn’t picked particularly strategically, earlier on I had shown the stark difference in dollars without inflation adjustment so I simply wanted to ensure fairness and accuracy in the presentation. I’m looking at total takeoffs and landings, not just commercial, since that seems to be most relevant for air traffic control across the board and across the country.
@Vcente – see above, nowhere in law is there a definition of programs, projects, and activities as it relates to sequestration. So just as with the Reagan Era example, it’s entirely up to the Office of Management and Budget (Executive Branch) to determine what that means for the purpose of figuring out how to comply. They decide what a program, project or activity is… could have said it was all of their ATC investments, and included NextGen in that, and done nothing but defer capital expense.
Once upon a time, Public Service was a higher calling…
For the past several years, the Obamacare law “required” things that made unions and crony corporations uncomfortable. The Administration just issued “waivers” from the law for millions of workers. Nothing in the original bill suggested that waivers could be issued, but it was done anyway.
Same thing here, it takes maybe 3 minutes to write an Executive Order, and this all goes away. I can’t think of a single pressure group that would oppose that either. The Justice Department certainly would not. The fact that no such order has been written, and none will be written, speaks volumes….
The most hilarious part of this to me, is the SHOCK & OUTRAGE from people that THEIR OX is being gored. Your Congress voted for all oxes being equally gored, as the “least painless” way to have automatic cuts. Because doing a real budget was just impossible for them. Now they act surprised that it’s playing out, exactly how it is outlined to play out.
A number of my relatives NEVER fly at all, so this is a completely painless ox for them to feel smug is being gored.
I’m going to take a guess and say that Gary is a Democrat. He only recently became Mr. Fancy Pants. 🙂
Lots of conservative whiners today huh? It’s always a conspiracy for them.
Gary, I enjoy your blog but you really have gotten it wrong here. While OMB and agencies determine what constitutes a PPA, PPAs are determined in the course if the budget and appropriation cycle and then to stay fixed for years and years once established. Sequestration requires a 5% cut from each of these predetermined PPAs. Neither the agencies nor OMB can change the PPAs in the middle of the fiscal year as the fiscal 13 budget and appropriations were enacted based on them.
This is Gary’s line I find most naive:
” I do think that folks actually running government agencies have an obligation to run them in as mission effective a way as possible under the budget circumstances given”
Given that we have a Congress that ever-more wants to dictate lots of rules, and micro-manage agencies, I don’t see how this works. The CPB is the most egregrious example of this, they can hardly get anything done for all the interference from Congress. So you’re an agency head doing your best to follow all the rules. They cut your budget and SAY explicitly that X% must come out of EACH budget category. *sigh* there’s no winning here.
Go look at the report on Scenario A & B outcomes, and how retarding the NexGen deployment would have potentially very large costs. It’s an investment that has not only FAA but many private industry elements to it.
http://secondtonone.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/FINAL-Econsult-Report.pdf
Anybody who believes that politics and gamesmanship are not the primary forces at work here is too intoxicated to fly.
Likewise for anybody who believes that a Republican administration wouldn’t play the same sort of games if the shoe were on the other foot. Does anyone remember the PATCO strike?
Posters here: Please don’t insult your readers’ intelligence by professing that your side is pure and innocent and the other side is mean and evil. Holding the public hostage to win a political objective is well within the bounds of normal politics.
I happen to believe that this is a poorly chosen tactic. Congress will begin to move a bill to restore funding, but before they pass it Obama will preempt them with an executive order. Then we’ll hear complaints from one side about why he didn’t do that on Day One and cheers from the other side about how he outfoxed Congress. As Gary says, that will all be fake.
I agree with your post. It’s like a small child throwing a tantrum at the store because you wont buy every toy there.
@Jen remember that we’re currently operating under continuing resolutions and not the normal budget/appropriations cycle. And since PPAs are not defined in law there’s no reason that the OMB cannot make a determination here.
@Jen “fiscal 13 budget” What fiscal 13 budget?
The last Federal budget was in 08. We are operating on smoke, mirrors and executive orders now.
I think your simple Maths is mostly flawed. You claim to be neutral on the subject but at the same time you present as evidence something that is fundamentally flawed from the outset.
I have no stake in this but can give you pointer:
– CPI is Consumer Price Index. Do you really think that implementing WAAS, NextGen, Sat Navigation and implementing GPS approach and paying wages is like buying tomatoes and peanuts? Is the FAA in the consuming business?
– how was the delay situation in 08 anyways… Ontime arrival was about 70% in 2008 and 85% in 2012. So how come with similar level to 2008 would you expect the same level of performance as in 2012?
Gary, I’ve learned a lot from your starting a discussion on this, in that before reading it I was also suspecting the FAA of budgetary shenanigans. However far more of my learning has come from Vicente, Andrew and from some online research, rather than from your “simple math.” For more insights on this complex issue, you might check this Washington Post Fact Checker column by Glenn Kessler, who covered airlines and air safety for five years and brings some expertise to the matter. Without reaching a final “verdict,” he finds that the FAA makes a better case than its sequestration critics:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/post/sequester-politics-the-faa-claims-of-furloughs-and-closed-towers/2013/02/26/16a989c8-8084-11e2-a350-49866afab584_blog.html
Among the many facts that Kessler highlights:
“As for expenditures on consultants and travel, FAA officials say that is an incorrect explanation of the data. Officials say $514 million spent on “advisory and assistance services” refers not to consultants but to operational contracts to support the air traffic control system.
That means things like telecommunications and weather radar — assistance that helps maintain the integrity of the system. Consultant contracts amount to $21 million, but that mostly means environmental experts who check to make sure noise regulations are being followed.
The $154 million in “travel and transportation of persons” refers mainly to on-site equipment repair, FAA officials said. It also includes travel for new controller training, but that will be suspended as part of the sequester.”
Now, we can’t automatically take what the FAA officials say at face value, but Kessler seems to know his stuff in evaluating their and the critics’ claims, and in finding that there is more to this issue than the critics’ (or your) simple math.
Cuts have consequences. And many, in fact, are taking the form of education, health services and other reductions that do more damage than those we relatively privileged frequent flyers face. (Don’t get me wrong: I share the hate of the inconvenience the FAA cuts impose.) Once we get past glib assertions about government waste, we find that we can’t wish or slogan those consequences away. And the simple math of back-of-the-envelope calculations such as yours, however well-intentioned, cloud rather than clarify matters.
@Southside I’m only talking about the FAA cuts because they’ve been among the most public,and because they affect the subject of this blog.
The article you cite is from February and simply notes that since the FAA budget is heavily weighted to personnel, the bulk of the cuts aren’t out of whack coming from personnel. But only about a third of the personnel are air traffic controllers. I’ve suggested that many aviation experts suggested deferring capital investment (NextGen) and the concluding piece of the article actually suggests NextGen could well get hit by sequester.
So the piece doesn’t agree take on the arguments that I’m making here in April about what the FAA is actually doing vs what they could have chosen to do.
@Minos what form of inflation adjustment would you prefer to see / believe is a fairer adjustment?
Gary, if you actually read the FAA budget (I have, and from your comments it appears you have not) NextGen sits well above the level of a PPA – it is one of the four major budget categories. Only if the OMB makes a farce of the PPA definition (all of the FAA is one PPA) can the FAA make cuts exclusively to NextGen and not ATC.
By the way, ATC expenses are already over 70% of the FAA budget. To avoid any cuts to ATC you would literally have to zero out NextGen finding for the rest of the year, as it accounts for about 8-9% of the FAA budget.
Finally, the issue of a continuing resolution vs budget is a red herring. A budget is simply an adopted guideline by Congress to committees that pass the actual appropriations bills (which give actual legal authority to spend money). Continuing resolutions simply skip the guidelines phase and just appropriate the money. Perhaps not wise budgeting but a total red herring for the purposes of (re)defining PPAs as those are determined by appropriation bills.
Basically your whole supposition about cause and effect reek of an ill-informed hunch backed up by what your read on a couple of political blogs. If you spent any actual time researching this you’d realize you are wrong.
Very well said Gary
Thanks for your comment on my comment, Gary, as indicated in the article’s very title – “Sequester politics: the FAA claims of furloughs and closed towers” – the piece is exactly about what we’re debating here.
Furthermore,contrary to how you sum it up by claiming that the article “simply notes that since the FAA budget is heavily weighted to personnel, the bulk of the cuts aren’t out of whack coming from personnel,” it goes into considerably more detail about why, again, things aren’t so simple.
You also commented, “I’ve suggested that many aviation experts suggested deferring capital investment (NextGen) and the concluding piece of the article actually suggests NextGen could well get hit by sequester.” So does your double suggestion language translate into your suggesting that NextGen be cut rather than the ATCs, even though such delays impose far more costs down the line? Regardless, the fact that some experts believed that NextGen could be cut does not mean that they should be cut.
Finally, in referencing other harms from the sequestration, I was not suggesting that you should be writing about them. I just wanted to put some of the air travel inconvenience in perspective, since the broader argument being made by some here is that if the wasteful government wanted to it could simply trim the fat without doing doing harm.
@Andrew Umm, Ok, most of your comment is at the level of bluster “what I’ve read” vs. “what you’ve read” and that I get my data “from political blogs” which isn’t even close. My point since February is that since the definitions aren’t set in law, the administration makes determinations, and doing so would be an exercise of far less discretion than they regularly exercise.
And if you’ve actually read the FAA budget you know that the allocation of funds between accounts and programs is near silly — breaking out dollars across safety,economic competitiveness, and operational excellence for the air traffic operations accounts as though they’re meaningfully separate programs. Tons of discretion in the allocaitons already.
None of which answers why you think the FAA shouldn’t be able to perform at 2008 levels while still funded above those levels post-sequester
@Southside actually the article referenced spends a great deal of time on specific comments, and on rural towers, and doesn’t offer any judgment about the ability of the FAA to exercise discretion based on the lack of statuatory language defining programs, progrjects, accounts. And I do think kicking the can down the road on capital investment — while far from ideal – would have been the better course. But it also wouldn’t have raised public alarms so is less attractive to decision-makers.